A 96-year-old widower has just set a record for late-blooming song fame — cracking Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart with a touching ode to his late wife.

Fred Stobaugh of Illinois — who wrote the lyrics to “Oh Sweet Lorraine’’ for his departed wife and mailed them into an amateur music contest — is now the oldest person to ever land a single on the chart.

At No. 44, he’s even outpacing MTV superbrats such as Rihanna and Taylor Swift.

“I thought, ‘Oh, shoot, I’ll just write a letter and send it all in,’ ” Stobaugh says in a YouTube video made about the song.

The lyrics immediately hit a note with musician Jacob Colgan, who runs a recording studio in Peoria called Green Shoe and launched a songwriting contest for locals in the spring.

Colgan turned the lyrics into a finished song, and a video about the project, posted in July, quickly went viral and pushed the track up the iTunes charts. Last month, it briefly surpassed the Justin Timberlake single, “Mirrors.”

The mellow tune features lyrics such as, “I wish we could do all the good times over again … Life only goes around once but never again … but the memories always linger on … No, I don’t wanna move on … That’s why I wrote you this song.”

Stobaugh, a retired truck driver who swears his “singing would scare people,” penned them after Lorraine, his wife of 72 years, died in April.